alphabet gumbo story

Write down the letters of the ABC. For each one, choose a word that begins with that letter. Now, write a post about anything — using all the words you’ve selected.

The morning came suddenly to the Alpha Quadrant. It was bright and the painted sky gave painless birth to brilliant pale yellow and orange streaks that ran across the majestic horizon. The air was crisp and clean, filled with butterflies and lady bugs and winged ants and a lonely firefly that forgot to go to sleep. As the birds awakened, insects dwindled, making their escape to avoid becoming breakfast for the sparrows and bluejays and cardinals that perched on limbs yawning to the morning sky. The energy of the day was high. Memories of the many yesterdays reminded all things of their future. Tomorrow floated near as the crystals gave warnings of what was to come. All the stones knew. They were the first and would probably be the last. They were the healers of our world. They healed the soil and the trees and the oceans each time they bruised and cried out to be relieved of the burden of use. It was the stones’ duty to heal through memory, through the many reminders of a planet transformed by constant change. The planet was like an island within its solar system, and the air between each planet was like the oceans, surrounding each world with a life giving force that breathed to remain.

Joy embedded itself in all things. It touched the soul of the world that housed inquisitive beings who needed to know the why of their existence more than the how. They beseeched Kachina to tell them everything, but there would be no answer, at least not one that told them the truths they needed to know. Why were they made? Was there desire involved? Was it loneliness? Or was it simply to give to the created that which Kachina had, life and a sentient existence? Maybe it was to discover what Kachina existed within without understanding why. Maybe it was to know love. So many questions. Was love in a magnolia tree? Was it born from it? Was it in an apple or pear tree? Did it live within dandelions or mangoes, almonds or pine? Maybe it lived in everything and nothing at all. Maybe.

Maybe each living thing greeted each other with words like namaste or sawubona or sani bonani in a language meant only for plant beings. Could we hear them if we listened? Or would we remain the other species, the one on this world that has lost memory of a connection to everything, the one that can’t remember that speaking to other living things was once second nature and necessary for our survival. The hearing was easier back then, in the days outside of history, before writings in stone and oral transmission of memory. Memory. It was once the panacea for everything. It healed matter without question or consequence. It was memory that gave the rose its scent, the leaves their green and clouds the ability to rain. Memory made love making sexy. Memory wrapped itself around sensual bodies tangled with the history of beginnings in wombs that burst like stars giving birth. They burst long and hard and stretched beyond the universe and its edge. Beyond the edge, behind the stars, they still found unexpected life. It lived inside velvet ripples of nebulas and quasars and purple light.

Their too late wisdom doesn’t matter. It won’t change what is. They are here, inside this moment where examining themselves is critical to uncovering the road to true freedom and peace and love. But even then, it won’t matter. Time cycles back to where everything began. Something now examines them for them, and reminds them that their Xanadu was left behind many millennia ago in the age of nakedness. There can be no return to that idyllic time of yesterday, when men were men and women were women and equality was not a word, but a way of life. Women, the keepers of the planet, zaftig from a full ripe womb, they bear witness to the truth—life will find a way.